衛武營國家藝術文化中心 Weiwuying National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts

Text: Dai Ju

Photos: forgood music

Waa WEI, who had fallen just short of winning Golden Melody Awards numerous times during her 18 years of hard work as a vocalist, finally won one in 2020. This led to many more ad endorsements and gave her name greater visibility, at which time she attained the ranks of those whose Taipei Arena concert tickets sell out in seconds. Her voice, having been chided by the media as "weird" in the past, is now one of the most iconic of this generation.

Besides getting ready for a concert at the Taipei Arena, she has also been preparing for a show at Weiwuying called Bossa Nova in the Vineyard. With unique spatial arrangements and variation in musical style, she always gets her fans to truly feel music, which she calls "the greatest thing in the world."

"I originally decided to release Have a Nice Day to line up with my show at the Taipei Arena," WEI tells me. What she did not expect was a Covid outbreak in May that caused her agency to immediately halt the promotional schedule. Thinking back on it, she laughs, "The concert was supposed to come first, and my team asked me for the name of the album, but not even one song was done yet, so I just decided on something kind of vague: 'have a nice day.' When you hear that, you think of those yellow happy faces and just start feeling happy. This simple sentence can really help you deal with all the big and little things in life."

Now that Covid is part of our daily lives, the sentence seems even more to be a form of blessing: Whether life is going well or not, there are always ups and downs, so you have to figure out how to handle them.

Serious Messages Need to Be Sung Gently

The new album continues with the discussion in her previous album, Hidden, Not Forgotten, of permanent separation from someone close, taking it a step further in a detailed observation of the heart. Whenever WEI thinks of family, beloved cats, and friends she has lost, aftershock sets in, and it takes a while to free herself from it. Though she doesn't know when the pain will pass, she has had to find a way to ease it: "A lot of times, I'm the only one who can comfort myself. I say, 'It's alright, don't cry.' This is the feeling I want to transmit." She does not want it to feel heavy though; instead, she wants to express it in a loose, everyday way.

So one of her new songs, "Merci Beaucoup" ("沒事不哭" in Chinese, which sounds very similar to the French title and means "it's OK, don't cry"), done in the Shibuya-kei style, is about these feelings she is having trouble getting over. She shares, "Whenever I hear Shibuya-kei music, no matter how serious the lyrics are, it always sounds light, like you're at the beach in shorts and a white shirt." But few people know the song’s title (in Chinese) was originally "沒事沒事" (it's OK, it's OK), using repetition like many of her other song titles. "The name change wasn't calculated. One day in the recording studio, I just realized and thought it was pretty cool that "沒事不哭" sounds a lot like 'merci beaucoup.'"

She candidly shares that, since becoming a mother, as long as Louis is fine, everything else is fine: "I grew up in a single-parent family, so to me, my grandma was my mom. I learned everything I know from her. Everyone knows that you have to be a mom when you're a mom, but no one ever told me how to actually do it. Every day as a mother is learning." She still has many unanswered questions in this aspect.

Her Most Intimate Partners in Music

Of course, being a mother has not only required her to learn a lot but also challenged her in her work. While producing Hidden, Not Forgotten, she was so preoccupied with taking care of Louis that the whole production team had to work around his schedule. When it was time to work on Have a Nice Day, since Louis was a bit older, she was more able to find scattered bits of free time to work.

She says, "Getting pregnant was really a surprise. My doctor had told me my chances were slim, but it actually only took one try! It was kind of like this album. At first, I just wanted simple music, but it turned out to be my hardest and has the biggest range in register."

For the production of her latest album, she stayed with the group Lovely Baby (CHEN Chien-Chi, HUANG Shao-Yong, and HAN Li-kang), as they have always been closest to her in music, like family, always helping her to happily make the music she wants.

She says the huge flower arrangement atop her head on the cover is a metaphor to show that all things beautiful have a weight to bear, which was her greatest realization after winning the Golden Melody Award in 2020: "Though I accepted the award given to me, it isn't only mine, because behind the scenes is a whole production team that made it possible. I realized I'm no longer just an individual."

"And there are my fans too. They're supporting me. I've always been self-conscious about my appearance, but they always look at me through filters. Whenever I hear anything good about me from people, I wonder if they're just saying it. I often doubt that I’m actually that good. But when I realize the tickets have sold out and that I'm getting more and more fans, I finally become convinced that if they think I'm so good, why shouldn't I have confidence? Then I think I should work even harder and show them even more of what I can do."

A Bossa Nova Album Awaits

So after the award, what's next? She answers, "Even though I've checked that off my list, I can still bask in the enjoyment of it. If I've won one, maybe I can win more, and maybe I can get more shows at the Taipei Arena. For the moment, the only thing I'm not looking to have more of is kids. I've released seven albums and have a Golden Melody Award, so I finally don't have to worry about people calling my voice weird and can keep challenging myself with new styles of music!"

After I ask what more she wants to do in music, she says that she has wanted to do a whole album of bossa nova. Of course, this is not just something out of the blue. In looking at her work from the past, you can find quite a lot of jazz pieces, from "Old Maid" and "Lonely Barbie has no one to care about her" during her time with the band Natural Q to her solo work of "Question Mark," "Crooked," "A Song for My Son," and "Champion." She also did "Mr. Seagull, I Love You" in homage to the late "father of bossa nova" João GILBERTO.

She believes jazz to be a free type of music. I asked her if there is anything she has to especially pay attention to when working in jazz. She says, "When you're doing Mandopop, you have to be aware of so many little details in terms of your tone and emotions, but jazz is in sections, like writing an essay question. You find your way within the beat, and whatever you do, it's you."

She has recently been invited by trumpet player Stacey WEI to collaborate, first in 2020 at the National Taichung Theater, and now for a jazz concert next year at Weiwuying. She clearly remembers their first cooperation: "While practicing with that awesome jazz group once, when the brass started playing, my sheet music fell off the stand! I was both stunned and nervous because in singing jazz, you have no real beat to follow; the tempo is too free. I was worried that if I sang too fast, they'd speed up too. I had to keep time by tapping my hand on my thigh."

Thankfully, the end result was good. She explains, "The experience during the actual performance was so different from what I was used to. Many of the people in the audience were old, so I couldn't yell at them like I usually do with my fans. I just sang, but the way it touched me was perhaps greater than my normal experiences. And at the end, they were all so happy and shouted, 'Bravo!'"

Such resonance with the audience might have come about because she holds nothing back in sharing all of her passion whenever she performs, and her audiences are indeed penetrated by her rich language of emotion. She may still not know just how much power her name alone possesses to help people "have a nice day."

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Bossa Nova in the vineyard